Notes from Mildewed Files
HERMAN, GEORGE E.
Notes from Mildewed Files Conversations with Kennedy By Benjamin C. Bradlee Norton. 251 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by George E. Herman CBS News, Washington Benjamin Bradlee had a special...
...At best, however, what we have been given is a slap-dash paste-up of old notes before they mildewed-fragments that will fit usefully into future definitive biographies...
...Says Bradlee: "He insisted that he was glad that someone was keeping some kind of record of the more intimate details without which the real story of any Administration cannot be told...
...Bradlee declares frankly in the Introduction that the President talked like an ex-Navy man...
...It's hard to know what to make of this book...
...Teddy will learn how to smile sardonically in two or three years, but he doesn't know how yet.'" The other smile is noted to take the sting out of an offensive remark...
...then, in time, bringing this valuable journalist back into the fold...
...But by then the book is over and its subject is dead...
...Bradlee displays a certain queasiness about being used himself...
...Never mind...
...In fact, it is hard to believe this volume came from the same pen as That Certain Grace, Bradlee's moving and beautiful eulogy of Kennedy...
...The conversation turns to the intimate details of how an official tried to hide some Cezanne paintings from Mrs...
...Except in this book...
...Bradlee asks the President what his reaction would be if the Soviet Union staged a similar protest here and drily records that he got no answer...
...The art of conversation is only partly verbal...
...From there it's on to Khrushchev and Berlin and talk about Newsweek magazine, Bradlee's employer at the time...
...That is one of the few warm bits of writing in what is on the whole a cool journalistic book of old conversations carefully reconstructed from Bradlee's files...
...Kennedy has taken umbrage at a Time magazine charge that his brother Edward had smiled sardonically...
...nothing more, nothing less...
...We communicate with the body, the hands, eyes, face, and tone of voice...
...Sometimes you really feel you can get a better grasp of Kennedy as a person from the remarkable candid photos by the former White House photographer, Cecil Stoughton...
...And the stakes were too high for inevitability, where one false step, one simple misunderstanding could wipe out 'all of us at this table and our children.'" That's all, folks...
...For his part, Bradlee would submit his finished story to the President for clearance before it was published-an arrangement the newsman still has qualms about...
...The reason is simple...
...Bradlee, now editor of the Washington Post, says in the Introduction that his intention is to show Kennedy as he was, in the flesh...
...And the Bradlees have been invited to the White House for dinner with the Kennedys and one other friend...
...Most White House reporters suffered the mixture of wooing and ostracism uneasily, albeit with a certain amount of competitive joy...
...Brighter than FDR...
...Once he smiles in a hilarious passage on the subject of smiles...
...It is hard to know why this should cause any excitement...
...Now we are being treated to some of those "intimate details...
...Only in the epilogue after Dallas do we detect that same powerful writing and deep perception...
...There is plenty about Kennedy's feelings toward liberals in general and those he appointed to office in particular...
...To the best of my recollection, Bradlee's Kennedy never frowns, never glares or beams, and smiles only twice...
...In another revelation, sure to be more disenchanting to younger Kennedy fans, Bradlee discovers the President has been considering with the CIA plans to stage an anti-regime "student demonstration" in the Dominican Republic...
...But not everybody will agree with his personal estimate of the President: a "remarkable man who lit the skies of this land bright with hope and promise as no other political man has done in this century...
...Many of them are disappointingly flat...
...Kennedy, to a discussion of a recording spoofing the Kennedy family, to a discussion of how FDR had responded to similar Presidential imitations...
...It is equally hard to know why Bradlee felt compelled to detail this fellow Bostonian's private language so relentlessly...
...Bradlee would get copies of secret FBI files on the backers of certain "hate sheets" offering fabricated accounts of a previous JFK marriage and divorce...
...He was his friend, sometimes...
...He thought them unrealistic, had a certain amount of contempt for them, and used them...
...What will be disturbing for some people are the glimpses behind the screen of style Kennedy erected-where the question of ethics and Presidential power is involved...
...In these exchanges he surely does...
...In a few places the President talks about pain, specifically his back pain which during one conversation was considerable...
...Reviewed by George E. Herman CBS News, Washington Benjamin Bradlee had a special relationship with President John Kennedy...
...and his chronicler, whose note taking on their private and semi-private conversations had the President's consent and approval...
...The world has stepped back from the brink of possible all-out nuclear warfare...
...Clearly surprised that Kennedy was unconcerned with the morality of such an action...
...Bobby and I smile sardonically' he said with a smile...
...Brighter than Wilson...
...For example: The Cuban Missile Crisis is over...
...Surely Ben Bradlee the editor would have sent this book back for a full-scale rewrite...
...Through his eyes we again see the Kennedy clan extending and withholding friendship-sending him into exile when he wrote a story that was not thought favorable enough...
...Apparently the President had none about showing confidential files, nor apparently does Bradlee object to this...
...Finally we get the word: "The President reflected several times about Cuba and Khruschev and what it feels like to go eyeball-to-eyeball...
...It is neither disturbing nor immoral-nor important...
...But we don't find out whether he winces as he gets in or out of a chair, whether he holds himself stiffly, looks cheerful or miserable, or uses the crutches the doctors prescribed for part of this period...
...In short, we are left mostly with words, and there has already been too much fuss over some of them...
...Although Bradlee undertakes to tell us what President Kennedy was like, he reports merely what President Kennedy says...
...Here it comes, the real inside story of the ordeal of power on the Brink: "He was philosophical about it, but he said the inevitability of it all was so discouraging...
...We learn that the Chief Executive, at a time when he wasn't even speaking to Bradlee and had exiled him from all favor, arranged a deal...
...The apocalypse has been averted...
Vol. 58 • June 1975 • No. 12
